Bill Gates Post Revisited — The Reactions
Yesterday I posted a story about an interaction I had with Bill Gates when I worked at Microsoft.
The gist was that some* engineers overapply the thinking they use in coding to user experience problems and that it results in overly abstracted user interfaces that don’t relate well to human beings who are not as neatly organized and categorized as some of the code these engineers produce. And right on cue, some folks who disagree with me made comments that illustrate my precept (or theirs depending on how you feel about the point I was trying to make).
“I’ve worked with designers who justify making multiple interfaces for similar functions. Frankly, this approach is almost always wrong and results in confusing interfaces and repetitive, difficult to maintain implementations. Simplifying an experience to it’s essence and ensuring that users learn quickly through consistency is key to design.”
“The author of this post strikes me as the bad sort of designer, one who views design as anything other than engineering and who justifies bad design with tortured “emotional” arguments.”
“Giving analogies mean 2 things: Either the receiving person is stupid or the one giving the analogy is bad at expressing his ideas.”
“too bad you spent all the time worrying about the design instead of securing the system. with all the malware attacks – beginning especially in the early 2000′s – the poor quality of windows products pretty much turned them into expensive toilets.”
“You have correctly identified the analogy fetish as a weakness. In UI design there are few facts and alot of preferences. If you dont have a black and white answer besides your taste, you cant expect anyone to follow your lead,”
“Bill was right. You sound like an artist, not a designer. Someone who could create beautiful objects and design simple interfaces, but has no clue about how to much engineering and deduction really is essential design. I learned my lesson working on interfaces with designers who think every situation requires a tailored interface. While correct in rare, highly explainable situations, this attitude is almost always to the detriment of quality and experience.”
“It was rude and I think you added nothing with your analogy. Apple may be able to find some work for you to do though.”
These are generally the people I avoid working with — we just view the physics of software design very differently.
* Let me be clear — I have been fortunate to work with several incredible software engineers who either understand how to balance engineering realities with the softer science of software design, or understand how to partner with talented designers to create something great — together.
Join the discussion 1 Comment
Orion Adrian
March 13, 2012 at 12:13 pm
I’m an engineer with a passion for design in UI, code, or elsewhere. Frankly I find a lot of engineers could use some more time looking at design principles. For one, a large amount of the code I look at day-in and day-out from people hacking ends up being this organically grown over-thought, “clever” mess. I believe there’s more in common between good design and good code than most people admit. Simplicity of thought, approachability, and not trying to shoe-horn too many concepts together. Ironically, I think most hackers who have a disdain for design usually write terrible code for people besides themselves. Some hackers are just implementing a common algorithm and those almost write themselves, but when writing new code that isn’t follow the math I find that people who can communicate effectively — people who appreciate English, history, art — are the people who make the best code in the long run. If you’re an engineer and the code you write isn’t blindingly simple and appropriate to the task, you’re probably giving some programmer like me who was hired to fix things after you, a massive headache.